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Comment by pcmaffey | Hacker News Reader

Is this _emphasis_ a meme I'm not aware of, or are you just copying the parent's particular usage?

It's common convention that's a couple decades old at this point, also included in markdown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Example

RFC 7, from May 1969, used it: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7.txt

Correction on that RFC: The 1969 version was handwritten, and likely did not use underscores for emphasis (who does that in handwriting?). It was typed up electronically in what looks to be 2002, and plenty of examples of the underscore notation exist prior to then.

Not in handwriting but on typewriters, which didn't have italics. Underlining text was used for emphasis on typewritten documents. Which is probably the origin of this convention. You can't underline in plain ASCII either, so people started putting underline characters _around_ words instead.

It's old emphasis from at least the IRC heyday era (where I picked it up), likley earlier as some of the sibling comments allude to. Interesting, HN takes asterisk characters around text and parses it to italics like this, but I tended to know that as meaning bold font emphasis, with /this/ as italics.

Regardless, it's certainly an old habit

It’s a computer-era simulation of the 100 (?) year-old convention of using underline to represent emphasis in typewritten documents.

Or maybe the same convention might have even been used before typewriters, to mark up manuscripts? (A manuscript needs clear instructions to the typesetter, because someone’s handwriting might not make the distinction between Roman and Italic scripts immediately obvious.)

Well great, I feel super old now.

I do this sometimes. It's like a form of underlining when underlining isn't supported. Also, I think people get the habit from using Markdown, which uses _this_ for emphasis.

People use it all the time on IRC.

Oops, I've been writing too much Markdown!

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